Oct. 4, 2013

Good lines: Ballet Des Moines resident dancer Carolina Machado Alves will perform in next weekend's triple bill. She grew up in Brazil, trained in Canada and the United States, and has toured as far as China. / BAllet Des Moines/Special to the Register

‘Celestial: A Triple Bill’

The program features three works choreographed by the company’s artistic director, Serkan Usta, ballet mistress, Lori Grooters, and guest choreographer Ma Cong of the Tulsa Ballet. The dancers include the company’s seven resident professionals, two guest pros and a handful of pre-professional students. “Death and the Maiden”Set to Schubert’s string quartet of the same title, Usta’s new work uses four couples to tell a loosely defined story. He explained it like this: “Death comes for every one of us, and one by one, he takes us. When it’s the maiden’s time to go, her friends plead for extra time. Death gives extra chances, but at the end, that’s it.” “Vivaldi in Motion”Grooters chose eight short Vivaldi recordings, including “Winter” from “The Four Seasons,” for a sequence she calls neoclassical. “Serkan’s and Ma’s pieces are more earthy, so I wanted to do something totally different,” she said. “I wanted to do a ballet with girls in tutus.” She uses traditional pointework (for the women) and was inspired in part by George Balanchine, the New York choreographer who Americanized traditional European ballet with bolder physicality. “Within the Bodies”Cong is restaging the work he created for the company in 2007. It’s also set to Schubert — a cello/piano duet — and describes the human connections between the “inner energy” of one soulmate to the next. “It’s very elegant,” he said. “It has a really good classical feel to it, but it shows a lot of passion at the same time.” WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Oct. 13 WHERE: Hoyt Sherman Place, 1501 Woodland Ave. TICKETS: $43 for adults, $28 for kids INFO:www.balletdesmoines.orgThe award-winning San Francisco dancer and choreographer Scott Wells headlines a showcase of modern dance with area pros: Cynthia Adams, Ken James, Kathleen Hurley and Co’Motion Dance Theater. Proceeds benefit the university’s dance students. WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday WHERE: Iowa State’s Forker Building, on Beach Road in Ames TICKETS: $5-$10 at the door INFO:cadams@iastate.edu

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It seems like a strange question, but let’s just toss it out there:

How do you watch a dance show?

You know what to do at a concert. You know how to watch a movie, where the words and story can pull you along. If you’re baffled at an art museum, you can just wander somewhere else.

But with dance that doesn’t tell a story, what exactly are you supposed to get out of it? And how do you know if it’s any good?

“Just relax. Really,” said Wynne Delacoma, who reviews dance and classical music in Chicago and spent 15 years at the Chicago Sun-Times. “Just relax and go without any preconceived notions.”

You’ll get another chance to try that next weekend, when Ballet Des Moines presents its annual triple bill at Hoyt Sherman Place and the San Francisco choreographer Scott Wells headlines a modern-dance event in Ames.

Delacoma said it’s important to open yourself not only to the performance but your own honest response. “Trust your gut. If something is grabbing you, then it’s grabbing you, and if it’s not, it’s not. If you worry too much about whether something is good, you might miss what’s actually there.”

OK. So if something grabs you — or doesn’t — the next step is to figure out why. Here are a few things to consider:

How does the movement match the music? Why did the choreographer like that music enough to spend weeks with it in the studio? Is each note tied to a gesture, or does the music simply set the mood?

“I like to work without music or add it later,” said choreographer Cynthia Adams, who teaches dance at Iowa State University. “The dancers don’t have to mirror exactly what’s going on in the music, and sometimes you can set up a contrast or use the music ironically. You can have really fast music and move very slowly, or vice versa.”

Balance is important, too, she said. A huge score like “Carmina Burana” can overpower whatever the dancers might be doing on stage, no matter how big or dramatic.

What does the choreography look like? Is there a uniform style?

Modern dance is often experimental, with an emphasis on individual expression. But even new ballet is more formal, with a specific vocabulary of building-block moves that choreographers can arrange in countless ways. Sometimes they break the rules for a specific effect.

If you’re in the audience, pay attention to whether the dancers look lighter than air, especially if they’re on pointe, or if they’re more grounded. Decide whether they seem frantic or serene, explosive or contained, or somewhere in between.

It’s also helpful to look for patterns, not only in the number of dancers on stage — in solos, duets and groups — but in how they move. Dancers often repeat sequences, like fans doing “the wave” at a football game. (Technically, that’s called metrachronal rhythm, as opposed to synchronization. Be sure to bring that up the next time you’re at the stadium.)

How do the dancers actually move? Do they embody the music? Does one motion flow smoothly into the next?

Ballet people talk a lot about “line,” which is hard to define but basically refers to the geometry dancers create with their bodies. Someone with good lines creates a harmonious profile, and if he or she were photographed, you could trace a smooth invisible line from the tips of the dancer’s fingers, through the arms, through the torso, and out through the legs and toes. By contrast, most of us are zigzags in everyday life.

There are athletic skills to watch, too, like how high a dancer can jump or how well he or she can balance a difficult position. But dance isn’t gymnastics. If there’s no emotion in the motion it’s a sport in makeup.

Seriously, though: Don’t worry too much about the technicalities. Don’t stress over some sort of hidden message. There’s nothing wrong with just sitting there, letting the experience sort of wash over you.

“It’s part of the human condition to seek meaning, to seek a narrative, but if it’s there, it should be apparent. So you can just enjoy how the bodies are placed on stage,” said choreographer Valerie Williams, who directs Co’Motion Dance Theater in Ames. “You can enjoy the physicality of the dances, and just the visceral joy of watching really good movers move.”

Most dance fans can remember the performance that got them hooked, the first time they saw a show that combined music and motion into a perfect whole.

For some viewers around here, that show was Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty” last weekend at the Des Moines Civic Center. It was a new twist on an old story, with fresh choreography and a knockout set.

Other A-list companies have succeeded here over the last few years, including more experimental groups like Pilobolus and Momix and Diavolo, whose balancing act on a rocking galleon created the most spellbinding few minutes I’ve ever seen on the Civic Center stage. It was like Cirque du Soleil but more poetic.

The show that first won me over was Ballet Des Moines’ first triple bill in 2006, with energized, even urgent, dancing to a haunting, hypnotic recording by the folk singer Lhasa de Sela. I didn’t really understand it but was amazed by how the show grabbed me without a single word.

And that’s saying something. In the age of iPhones and iPods and satellite TV, it’s almost therapeutic to focus for a bit. To just sit in the dark and watch and listen, even if you don’t get it.

“I think the world needs different views right now,” Iowa State’s Adams said. “Finding something that can be entertaining, thought-provoking, emotional on different levels — we need that. Our society needs art like that to grow.”